


Crossing Burnt Bridges

by Blue_Pandas



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe, Captivity, Don’t copy to another site, Dubious Consent, Escape, Light Smut, M/M, Major Character Injury, Multi, past non-sexual slavery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-02
Updated: 2019-09-02
Packaged: 2020-10-05 22:24:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,962
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20496302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blue_Pandas/pseuds/Blue_Pandas
Summary: When Harry wakes up trapped in the dark, he makes a call to two people he walked away from ages ago. It doesn't matter though; he doubts he'll make it out of here alive.





	Crossing Burnt Bridges

**Author's Note:**

> Betaed by the wonderful [trashgoblinwizardparty](https://archiveofourown.org/users/trashgoblinwizardparty) 💙
> 
> Harry has a romanticised view of his time as a slave and ends up in a relationship with Tom and Cedric, who were the human traffickers. There is also a redemption arc for Tom and Cedric. Do not read if you think this work contains triggers for you. Please note that this depiction is nowhere close to real life human trafficking, which is horrible and not something this author endorses or approves of in any way.

“Hello?” Tom’s voice is harsh, rather than his usual suave charm. There are no windows around him. Harry has no idea what time it is, but he knows that he has just woken Tom up from a deep sleep.

Harry has a whole speech planned, one he’s thought about for years. What will he say if he met Tom again? However, what comes out is, “I’m scared. It’s cold.” He sounds like a child, and he hates it.

The irritation disappears instantly. “Harry? What’s wrong. Where are you.” 

“I don’t—I don’t know.” His head hurts, and his glasses are missing. “I don’t know,” he repeats. 

“Tell me what you see, darling.” It is a different voice this time, a warmer voice that has Harry relaxing, more from conditioning than actual relief. Of the two of them, Cedric is the nice one. 

“It’s dark. I’m trapped.” Harry blinks his eyes a few times, trying to clear his vision a little. 

It doesn’t help. 

“Are you calling with your com.” Tom again. 

“Yes.” Whereas the muggle world has largely switched over to PDAs and other high-tech devices, the magical world is still stuck in the twenty-second century and old-fashioned communication devices that run on magic rather than electricity. There is enough ambient magic stored despite being in the muggle world for the call to go through.

Unfortunately, coms cannot be used to track locations.

“Is it completely dark?” Cedric asks. 

“No. I don’t—my glasses, they’re missing.” Harry blinks back tears. Gods, he doesn’t know why he wants to cry. Tears will only dehydrate him faster, make him die sooner. 

“Feel around. Tell us what you can,” Cedric coaxes. 

Harry pushes himself up to his feet. A sharp pain shoots through his head, and Harry drops his com with a clatter. He hits the ground, knees first, his hands scrabbling to find his lifeline as he curses the privacy spells that only let him hear the other side when he is touching the damn thing. 

His hands brush the edge of something. He grabs it. 

“Harry!” Tom is shouting. 

“I’m here. I’m here. I dropped the com.” He shuts his eyes and takes a breath. He has training. He might have been the payment of a debt, but that does not make him useless. “I am in a room tall enough for me to stand up in. I have”—he swallows—“I have a head injury.” 

“Nausea? Blurred vision? Dizziness? Do you hear ringing in your ears?” Cedric asks. 

He had not thought of it before, but now, Harry feels his stomach twisting, the urge to throw up rising. “Nausea and blurred vision,” he says. “Gods, my head hurts.” 

There is no mockery of his faith in multiple gods like Harry has come to expect recently. The wizarding world is polytheist, very much unlike the monotheist or atheist muggle societies. He finds it hysterical for some reason and bites back laughter as to not worry his owners more. 

Owners. Harry twists the word in his mind. Does he still consider them his owners? Does he still recognize wizarding laws despite pretending to be a muggle for years? 

“Estimate how large your location is,” Tom orders, and Harry drops the thought in favour of trying to escape. He can deal with his fucked-up mindset at a later time—or not if he does not make it out of here. 

Harry pats himself down. PDA. No signal, not that he’s surprised. He does not consider why he did not try his phone first. Penlight. Broken pieces of a wand. He cuts himself on the sharp edge and nearly drops his com again. Harry can feel blood trickling down the edge, and he presses his hand to his leg, applying pressure to stop the bleeding. With his free hand, he clicks on the penlight.

The small light flickers but it stays lit, and Harry offers a prayer of thanks to his goddess even as the light burns his eyes. He blinks rapidly, trying to clear the spots from his vision, his head aching. He aims it around the walls and sees no doors. “It’s not big. Three metres by three metres about. No door. How did I get in here?” 

“Did you check the ceiling or the floor?” 

Harry could smack himself. He knows better than to assume doors are only along the walls. He scans the floor and the ceiling just a few centimetres above his head. “A hatch. Above me.” He stumbles over, wobbly without a wall to hold him up.

He pushes. The door does not budge. There is no handle for him to try. He pushes harder. Nothing. “I can’t open it,” he gasps and slumps down. “I’m so tired,” he murmurs. 

“You can sleep later,” Tom snaps. “You’re going to open that door, Harry. If you make me go out there at three in the morning, I’ll punish you. Do you want that?” 

“No, sir,” Harry says because that is what Tom expects to hear. But at this moment, if Tom comes in through the door, Harry will take any punishment he wants to give.

He needs a solution. He is in an empty room. The way out is through a door that will not open. What are his options? He pockets the light and lifts his bloody hand to the door, trying to use both hands to push it open. The blood makes his palm stick to the door, and it hurts to pull away. 

He is leaving blood on the door.

“I’m bleeding,” Harry says aloud. 

“What happened?” Cedric asked, concern in every syllable. “How bad is the bleeding?” 

“I cut myself. On my wand. It’s broken.” Harry pauses and struggles to remember. “Did I tell you I broke my wand?” 

“You didn’t. It’s okay. I need you to stop the bleeding, Harry. Can you bandage it with something?” 

“No,” Tom interrupts. “Harry, how bad is the bleeding?” 

“Not that bad, I think. It’s just a cut on my palm.” 

“Right or left hand.” 

“Left.” 

“What is the largest distance between this door and a corner you can find.” 

Harry clicks on his penlight and looks around. “One and a half metres?” 

“I need you to listen to me very carefully, Harry. You’re going to blow up this door without blowing yourself up. Do you understand.” 

“Yes, sir.” 

“Use your blood. Draw a circle with two lines meeting in the middle from the edge of the circle in a forty-five-degree angle.” 

It has been years since Harry has done magic, much less advanced blood wards, but Tom’s orders are soothing as he guides Harry through the steps one by one. His mouth strains from holding the penlight. The wound in his hand is deep, and though the bleeding slows, it never stops completely. He carefully finger paints the lines and runes until he has the completed ward, an intricate design of blood smears.

There is just one problem. He has no wand, no magic to power the array. The muggle world—and since he has not been blown up, he is definitely in the muggle world—has ambient to power a com, but the com acts as an antenna, drawing in magic. He has no antenna for the ward.

And then it hits him what Tom is planning to do. “Don’t leave me,” he gasps. “Please. Don’t.” His fingers are caked with blood, and he is clinging to his com in desperation. 

“You’re going to live, Harry,” Tom says, the gentlest Harry has ever heard him. “You don’t need us to live, but you do need to let us go. We’ll find you. Now take apart your com, and place the stone in the centre of the ward. Run for the corner the moment you do. I’ll be very displeased if you get yourself killed after all this work.” 

Harry takes a deep breath and turns off the com. He fumbles a little, but he manages to separate the circular device in half. Inside is a small semi-precious stone, charged with enough magic to make his fingers tingle. He presses it to the blood rune. 

It does not fall.

He dives for the corner, pressing himself down into a ball and covering his head. He shuts his eyes, but even then, he can feel the searing white of the explosion flash through the room.

Waves of the explosion shove him harder against the wall, and it hurts.

But he is alive.

When he opens his eyes, he is still seeing double, now with flickers in his vision, but he can see a hole where the door used to be. 

Harry pulls himself out of the room. He is in a bigger room now, a barn or shed of some sort. There is no one around. He stumbles away, searching the walls once more until he finds a latched door. 

He lifts the latch and opens the door. 

The night air is crisp and cold. He is surrounded by trees. 

He can hear the sound of an engine. A car is approaching. 

There is no way Tom and Cedric have already found him, much less learnt how to drive a car. He flees into the woods before whoever it is can see him.

Harry does not know where he is going. He is wearing shoes, thank the gods. The pounding of his running steps matches the throbbing in his head. His injured hand is numb, and he does not know if that is a good sign. 

A rush of ice seeps into his shoes and soaks the bottom of his trousers. A river or stream, he realises. Harry makes it to the other bank and shakes his legs, trying to get the water out. 

He can see light in the direction he came from, moving white streaks as they pass through breaks in leaves and trees. Flashlights. 

Someone is searching for him. 

But why? Who is after him? Why is this happening to him? 

Harry has no answers. All he knows is that it’s cold, he’s injured, and he may not live to see his next sunrise. 

He starts running again, no goal in mind other than to get away. He knows things, such as leaving footprints and breaks in the foliage will make it easier to track him. If he had more time, he would double back, create false tracks. 

But they’re close. They’re gaining on him. 

Harry looks around, desperate for a solution. 

There is nothing. 

A body tackles him to the ground. He hits it with a thump, and pain radiates through his body. 

“What do you want!” someone screams, and Harry realises it’s him.

There is no answer. The assailant is pulling his hands together, and he feels the plastic zip tie surround his wrists. Before the assailant can tighten it, Harry rips his hand free and elbows the assailant’s abdomen as hard as possible. 

Their grip loosens. He kicks them off and rolls to the side, reaching desperately for anything he can use as a weapon.

His hand finds a cylindrical object. His penlight.

They come at him. Harry clicks the light on and shines it in their face. It is enough to make them falter. Harry grabs the broken wand, and, just as he used it to wound himself, he stabs them in the neck. When he meets resistance, he stabs again and again. 

A lifetime passes before Harry realises they are not moving. He slumps to the side. 

He’s so tired. With the last of his strength, he takes his wand and traces a design in the dirt next to him. 

His eyes close. 

* * *

The light hurts his eyes. Harry blinks furiously, trying to clear the spots from his vision. He twitches his fingers and toes, tenses his muscles as he tries to guess if he is restrained. 

He feels nothing. Harry looks around slowly, trying not to move his head. He is in a hospital room. 

No, that’s wrong. He is in a healer’s ward. He smells the familiar scent of a blood replenishing potion. 

“You’re awake.” 

Harry flops his head to the other side. Tom is sitting beside him, eyes severe and arms crossed. Cedric is there too, but he’s asleep, head resting on Tom’s shoulder. 

“I guess the location ward got enough power,” Harry says. The words are hard, his breathing constricted. 

“You left part of your core in it. The phoenix feather had enough magic for us to find you.” 

“That’s good.” He wants to ask what happened while he was asleep and what is going to happen next, but his mouth seems to not work. Harry’s eyes drift shut. He sees horrors in his mind, but the nightmares are not enough to block the bone-deep exhaustion.

He sleeps. 

* * *

In some ways, magic still has benefits that the muggle world fails to match. Harry’s body struggles to adjust from being injured to suddenly healed, and he is punished with a constant tingling in his nerves across his body, but he knows that, given time, it will go away. 

In other ways, the magical world is still lagging centuries behind the muggle world. Even if Tom and Cedric were not the ones to bring him in, they would still have been called. By magical law, Harry is still considered theirs because he has not paid off the debt, and they have control over his medical decisions.

Only the fact that it takes too much energy for Harry to roll his eyes, much less speak, prevents him from making biting comments at the medical team, who never even directly address him.

Harry leaves the wizarding world for the second time with less on his person than the first time. He has no wand and no com. 

But he also leaves with more. Tom and Cedric help him back to his flat in the muggle city he works in. He has a home, he has a job, and he has independence. 

Or maybe not the first.

His flat is a wreck. Broken lamps, glass on the carpet. Sofa ripped to shreds, the stuffing inside spilling over the place. His drawers are open, the contents scattered on the ground. 

Harry stares at the mess, trying to understand what he’s seeing.

“I have to—” call his work, step away from the crime scene, tell someone what happened to him. He does not even know if anyone has realised he is missing. “I have to work.” 

“Not today,” Tom says firmly. “You have two options. One, we get you room and board some place of your choice. Two, you come home with us.” 

Harry tries to make his brain work, but words don’t make sense to him anymore. He doesn’t answer. 

Tom does what he has always done since they met. He makes the decision.

* * *

Tom and Cedric share a house in the magical world. It had once been Harry’s home too. 

Things look different now. New pieces of furniture. Different paintings on the wall. The wood of the stairs is a different colour too. It is a foreign place to him. A week ago, Harry would have said that he preferred to not recognise this as home, but now, all he wants is something familiar.

Instead, Harry lies awake in a guest room despite the exhaustion in his limbs. He stares at shadows moving across the ceiling over his head as trees wave from the wind outside. His mind is restless and anxious.

He is scared, he realises. He is terrified that when he closes his eyes, he will open them to a dark room in a barn where no help is coming. What if he didn’t really escape? What if he imagined all that because he cannot face reality? 

Before he realises it, Harry is walking along the dark halls, his bare feet tapping lightly against the wood. His body remembers the way.

He knocks on the door. 

It opens, revealing a sleep-rumpled Cedric. “What’s wrong?” Cedric asks gently. 

“I can’t stop thinking. Make me stop thinking. Please?” Harry says. 

Cedric gathers him in his arms, holding him tightly. Harry sighs and snuggles up, trying to get closer though it is impossible. “Are you sure?” 

“When have you ever cared whether I was sure?” It comes out harshly, but Harry refuses to let himself regret it.

“Perhaps I’m trying to be better. _We’re_ trying to be better.” 

Harry pulls back and meets Cedric’s eyes. “I know I’m not in a good place. I know I shouldn’t make decisions. So I’m asking you to make the decision for me.” 

Cedric studies Harry. “Me? Or both of us?” 

There is no Cedric without Tom, no Tom without Cedric. They had never slept with him, but Harry has seen them go through multiple partners. The two of them together, that has always been a constant. But, and perhaps it may be foolish of him, Harry believes that, at this moment, whatever he asks for, they will do. 

That belief is enough for him to answer. “Both,” he whispers. 

Cedric propels them to the bed, where Tom has been watching them, and he hands Harry off to Tom. Lips meet his, and then, Tom is kissing him, all the while holding his weight to avoid pinning Harry down.

Harry sighs and leans back, lets them take him apart. He forgets the fear of being trapped and being pursued. He forgets the way the body felt as he stabbed someone. Killed someone. 

They ease him out of his clothes slowly in between kisses, and Harry relaxes into the sheets. A hand wraps around his cock, stroking him to full hardness. He came, a slow rush of pleasure through his veins, and his eyes close into a dreamless sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me on [tumblr](https://bluepandawrites.tumblr.com/)!


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